For it is the duty of the good man to teach others the good that you could not work because of the malignity of the times or of fortune, so that when many are capable of it, someone of them more loved by heaven will be able to work it.

Wednesday, 30 October 2013

If someone hasn't already said it, which they have, Foucault got the wrong century - the 21st century, or at least so far, is the Deleuzian century. There's the obvious critical sense of this, which is that Deleuze expresses the ideology of contemporary capitalism / power. There's some truth to this and I've made the accusation myself, but, ironically, I'd said Deleuze is the language of our contemporary consciousness. His thought shapes our awareness of the present moment and resistance to it: struggles as much as surrenders, ruptures as much as recuperations.

From folds, to resonance, to time-images, even Roland Simon (of TC) speaks Deleuzian (or Bergson/Deleuze) when it comes to characterizing the temporality of the present moment (thanks Daniel Spaulding). What is insinuated is a productive contradiction, a differentiated moment that might unfold the abstractions of dominance; vectored in Deleuze through life, but even then this is not so much the full life of post-autonomia, but a fleeting, even damaged, life.

I speak another language. I speak Derridean. This is by training, by forgotten inclination, by habitus, without the name appearing. Untimely is usually cool. Out of step now, in step with the future. It's a grandiose 'failure', in its Nietzschean way. Out of time, out of ideology (a bit). This untimeliness I feel belongs to the past, as much Derrida and the internalized remnants of British social democracy, shaping the contradiction of inaction, a dull weariness, a bad investment.

Oh me, oh my, oh lyric I. You can't teach a dead dog new tricks.

To miss the present moment then. To grasp it might involve an internal phenomenology of this Deleuzian moment. Deleuze as pharmakon.